1. Instead of sourcing the .sd.sh (or .sd.csh) file in my .bash_profile
script, I instead copied the .sd.sh script, renamed it to swriter and
copied it to /usr/local/bin. I then modified it by adding a:

#! /bin/bash

at the start of the script and a:

exec swriter3 $*

at the end of the script. Now all I have to do is run swriter and it
automatically sets up the appropriate environment variables and then runs
StarWriter. Saves having those environment variables pollute other
applications/environments.

2. I noticed that for a lot of people, StarOffice takes quite a while to
load (upwards of 60 seconds). The consensus on usenet was that a large
chunk of this time was due to the symbol relocations that the dynamic linker
has to do. ie, for each new symbol the dynamic linker has to locate the
appropriate library. StarOffice dynamically links against quite a few
libraries so the dynamic linker spends quite a bit of time searching through
lots of libraries.

There is a solution to this. I run StarOffice in a chroot'd jail. In the
jail, I just put the binaries and libraries that StarOffice uses (all the
libs out of /usr/X11R6/lib, libc/libm and libg++/libstdc++). StarWriter
takes approximately 15 seconds to come up on my P133/32MB. This is due to
the fact that the only libraries present are the ones needed by StarOffice
and hence the dynamic linker spends proportionately less time searching
through all the libraries on the system (ie, it doesn't search through all
the useless libs in /usr/lib etc looking to resolve symbols).